Analytics: Time

By Jim Tigwell – May 22, 2019

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A look at datafeeds and time.

When your analytics goals are refined, time starts to matter a lot. It's not enough to know how often users are active in your digital workplace, but what times they're most engaged. Are they logging on in the morning and staying on, or sporadically visiting throughout the day? How long to they spend being active in your Igloo, and what actions are they taking?

The table that ties all of this together in datafeeds is the dUtcHalfHour table. Using this, you can tie member actions to specific segments of time in your digital workplace. Unlike the audit trail, this table doesn't reference the exact time an action was taken, but aggregates them into segments. To find out precisely when an item was viewed or changed, we recommend using the Activity feed on that object, accessible through the Action Button.

Time

Rather than keeping precise times, your datafeeds divide each day into 48 half hour segments, and assign each one a key in the dUtcHalfHour table. This lets you look at actions in bundles of time, rather than having to specify a duration, and the utc_half_hour_key column is referenced in many other tables anywhere a time would normally be required. As a result, the dUtcHalfHour can be quite large, containing a new entry every half hour. It may be necessary to filter queries before using this table.

Using time

The utc_half_hour_key does the heavy lifting in Igloo time, and connects to all content and container tables. This lets you find the segments when a Channel, page or Space was created, as well as filtering for particular actions that were taken in that time. Tie the user_key from those tables to the dUser table to find out who took those actions as well, giving you a complete picture of all of the actions in a segment of time in your digital workplace.

Use cases

Once employed in your queries, the dUtcHalfHour has a lot of applications. You can find out what times of day people are most active, or the average length of time members spend in your digital workplace, for example. Study how people engage with your announcements by charting when people looked at or acted on them, and segment queries by space_key to see what Spaces are active at what times to identify areas of improvement.

dUtcHalfHour is an easy way to add time as a dimension to all of hour queries, and slices your Igloo activity into neat segments of time that fit your work day, regardless of time zone or work hours.